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Saturday, November 26, 2011

Biased Gannett Bleeds On Enqurier

If you've read this story about Rob Portman's participation in the 'Super-Committee' you would think the only person of interest on the committee was Rob Portman. You'd also assume that what ever Portman was doing, he was doing it without any hint of politics or partisanship.

The bias of the article was astonishing to me. I'll use the cliche 'putting lipstick on a big' because that's basically what it did. You can still smell the stink that was the 'Super-Committee,' but you can also smell the gallons of perfume trying to hide the Republican responsibility for the failure of the committee. I understand that Portman is local, but it is biased to make him the focus of the coverage when he was at best a single member of a team that failed. We got no insight about the Democratic members of the committee. We got a cloudy puff piece on a Republican that didn't hide the failure, but went out of it's way to make Portman look like he's not to blame. It's homerism of a different political/partisan bent.

The most annoying example of bias in the article came in how the reporter alternately labeled the American Enterprise Institute vs the Brookings Institution when describing a person quoted for the article. The AEI was referenced without any qualifying partisan adjectives:

"Portman is the key to me," Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Fiscal Times in August, after the 55-year-old Portman was tapped to be one of the six GOP lawmakers on the bipartisan panel. "Rob is smart, decent, not a crazy. He is the kind of person you'd want on this panel."

On the other hand the Brookings Instituion was labeled as 'left-leaning:'

Thomas Mann, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, similarly said the "supercommittee was doomed to failure" because Republicans took such a hard line opposing any significant tax increases. "The minor concessions were not serious," Mann said, referring to a GOP proposal that offered some revenue increases. "As a consequence, I don't think there were any pivotal players."

Gannett and the Enquirer know the AEI is a Conservative think-tank. It may be representing the more libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but it clearly is at a minimum a 'right-leaning' think tank. Bias runs deep and when you don't treat groups the same, you sink farther down into the muck with FOX News.